The Beginning: Ingress 2.0 (Prime) Announced

At the conclusion of the EXO5 anomaly series in San Francisco (Detailed anomaly scoring review to come), we saw the announcement of “Ingress 2.0”, now referred to as Ingress Prime.

For those that want to experience the initial environment, the entire thing was recorded and is available thanks to Matt Corley.

Shortly after this announcement, an embargo was lifted which resulted in a bunch of information being released via The Verge in this article and the launch of an Ingress trailer.

We are also shown a 4 second clip for an upcoming Ingress Anime as well.

As we can see with a side by side view, the interface will be receiving a large face lift in terms of design. Tons of questions emerged with this screenshot – like why does the field appear to have 2 layers? Thankfully another video “leaked” showing the game in action.

However, watching this upside down is a bit difficult. So another helpful user (Kousuke-kun) corrected that. Watching this video we hear an interesting conversation confirming that Ingress 2.0 is moving away from JSON and moving to Protobuf for the network layer. In non technical terms, the code base is aligning closer to the engineering style of Pokémon GO. This video also mentioned new filtering features for items & new key management!

We extracted some interesting screenshots from the video that showcases some of the items and screens.

ADA Refactor

Capsule

Circle K Power Cube

Fracker

Heat Sink

Heat Sink 2

Jarvis Virus

Key Locker

Lawson Cube

Portal Screen

MUFG Capsule

Multi Hack

Menu System

Media

Portal Screen 2

Portal Images

Power Cube

Profile Screen

Resonator

Heat Sink Transfer

ITO Transmuter

XMP Burster

The Verge article showed that Niantic grew from 35 employees to 150 after the success of Pokémon GO. With this increased staff hopefully the game continues to evolve not only visually, but in terms of protection against those nefarious actors who live to break it.

An interesting quote to borrow from the Verge article was:

Ingress Prime will be available as an update to the existing game at some point next year, and Hanke says that the new version is a “completely re-written new client.”

So while Ingress Prime might be for marketing purposes, this is Ingress 2.0, an upgrade to the existing game. Hopefully as we enter 2018 more and more details regarding Ingress Prime will be announced. Will we continue to cover any news and relay what we find.